With 1.6 million followers on the social network, Slawomir Mentzen, 38, knows how to rouse the hundreds of teenagers and others gathered in the main square of the central city of Radom. His sentences are short and cutting.
Polling third in opinion surveys with 11 to 15 percent of votes, Mentzen trails the frontrunner, pro-European Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski (32 percent), and conservative historian Karol Nawrocki (27 percent).
Mentzen believes Poland is subservient to Brussels, the state is destroying entrepreneurs, today’s politicians are incompetent, abortion is a crime and migrants threaten women and children.
Claiming that migrants posed a threat, she told AFP: “I’m concerned about my daughter’s safety, as well as my own and that of other women”.
Mentzen also sees Ukrainian refugees as taking advantage of Poland, which welcomed them with open arms after Russia invaded their country in 2022.
“It’s unacceptable. Everyone’s felt it. In their pockets, their minds, everywhere,“ said the construction specialist who works in Belgium.
In 2019, Mentzen said, “we don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the European Union”.
But he still speaks of reforming the EU, and his programme includes opposition to migrants, Ukrainians and abortion.
For Maciej Strozik, who attended the campaign rally in Radom with his family, Mentzen offers a breath of fresh air.
“He’s in opposition to a kind of duopoly that’s run the country for years,“ the 30-year-old told AFP.
According to analyst Jaroslaw Kuisz, supporters of Mentzen and his Confederation party “are above all tired of the political ritual of now this camp, now the other”.
“Parties like Confederation, or candidates like Mentzen -- and we see them in Western Europe too -- have very simple slogans and solutions for almost everything,“ she told AFP.
For Kuisz, Confederation is a party “of the era of digital politics... which calls for quick dopamine hits and insists on breaking from the predictability” of politics.
He answered no questions.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Polish far-right candidate bets on TikTok in presidency bid )
Also on site :